In today’s educational environment, school principals must support change so that schools are better able to meet the needs of students while creating a culture where teachers feel supported, respected, and empowered. A thoughtful and aligned plan to distribute leadership offers a potential solution to meeting both of these goals. Policies around the United States and the world have sought to increase the amount of
leadership that is distributed by school principals to school-based staff (Hallinger & Heck, 2009). This is specifically evident in North Carolina with the creation of the principal and assistant principal evaluation tool created in 2009 (North Carolina School
Executive: Principal and Assistant Principal Evaluation Process, 2012). The nature of
distributed leadership is that all members of a school community have the potential to lead (Harris & Muijs, 2004). Followers impact the leadership activity, just as leaders and the environment do (Spillane et al., 2003). As leadership is distributed throughout a school, there should be a measurable impact on all staff in the building.
The purpose of this study was to first analyze data available from the North Carolina Teacher Working Survey to identify if there were specific indicators linked to the underlying factor of distributed leadership. After a link was discovered, I then created two measures of distributed leadership in a school based on the perceptions of teachers in that school. Taking these measures of distributed leadership, I compared them with the teacher turnover rate at the school, being sure to control for other school
variables, including the following: the district of the school, the growth score of the school, the achievement of the school, and the percent of poverty of the student body.
Theoretical Framework of Distributed Leadership
The starting point for this distributed leadership framework is that leadership activity is the unit of analysis for work concerning leadership (Spillane, Diamond, & Jita, 2003). This leadership activity is stretched over the leader, the follower, and the
situation and is fluid depending on the context (Spillane et al., 2003; Spillane, 2005). Leadership is distributed and leads one to ask how should it be distributed to best meet the needs and goals of an organization. One specific way in which leadership is
distributed is known as planful alignment (Leithwood et al., 2007). Planful alignment involves coordinating and fostering the interdependencies that naturally happen with social interactions (Leithwood et al., 2007). The thoughtful planning of who, how, and when leadership should be distributed in the best interest of the organization provides the framework for the research of this study.
A review of the literature reveals that thoughtful alignment presents several components of distributed leadership. These components are empowerment, space for shared decisions making, and building leadership capacity (Hairon & Goh, 2015). A study by Hairon & Goh (2015) revealed that empowerment was critical to distributed leadership, but that from the perspective of leaders, it needed to be bounded by the vision and the goals of the school. This study also found that sharing decisions and developing leaders were key aspects to distributed leadership. (Hairon & Goh, 2015). The study also determined that collective engagement, which means engaging all staff in the work of school and focusing them on the vision and goals of the organization, was a
critical product of a formal leader distributing leadership across a school building (Hairon & Goh, 2015).
Along with leadership components, there is research on the leadership functions that are distributed in schools that have implemented distributed leadership
successfully. In these schools a principal or formal school leader begins by building trust among all staff members and the capacity to lead with a smaller group of people (Day et al., 2009). He or she then creates or changes current systems and structures to allow for the collective capacity of the school as a whole to grow while fostering
leadership of others to manage the instructional program as progress is made towards organizational goals (Day et al., 2009). This increase in collective capacity and the management of the instructional program requires even more staff members to take on leadership roles (Day et al., 2009). The principal or the formal leader of the school identifies staff to lead based on staff members’ expertise and personality traits and based on the situation where leadership is needed (Day et al., 2009).
In identifying the questions in the North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions Survey, it was important to focus on questions around distributed leadership
components and leadership functions. Aligned with leadership functions, I also identified questions from the survey related to empowerment, shared decisions, developing leadership, and collective engagement.
Research Questions
Can one effectively measure the distribution of leadership across a large range of schools using the North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions Survey? This is the primary question of this research study. Once I created a model that was a good fit to the data collected around the latent factor of distributed model from teacher perception
surveys, I used that model to effectively measure the perception of distributed
leadership in schools participating in this survey. Using those measures, I was able to answer the second research question for this study related to teacher retention data: is there a correlation between the perception of distribution of leadership in a school and the teacher turnover rate at that school? Examining the link between distributed leadership and teacher turnover enables discussion around the effective distribution of leadership as a possible solution to our current teacher shortage crisis.
Hypothesis
I propose that both the latent factors of distributed leadership are evident in certain questions used in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey. These latent factors will have a measurable and significant correlation with at least some of the identified indicators. Thus, it will be possible to use the indicators to create a model using teacher perceptions from data collected in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey that can accurately measure distributed leadership in a school. I also hypothesize that distributed leadership at a school has a positive correlation on the overall teacher retention rate at that school.
Data
Data for this study comes from the 2016 North Carolina Teacher Working
Conditions Survey (“North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions Survey”, 2016). This survey grew from work completed by the North Carolina Professional Teaching
Standards Commission (NCPTSC), which conducted a literature review focusing on teacher future employment plans (2014North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions
retention. They then defined and built standards under each of these factors, and then used this work to create the teacher working conditions survey starting in 2002 (2014
North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey Research Brief, 2014). Then
beginning in 2009, the survey shifted to the Teaching, Empowering, Leading, and Learning (TELL) survey instrument, taking the previous survey and including questions focused on student behavior, support from the community, and support around
instruction to produce a survey comprised of eight categories: time, facilities and resources, community support and involvement, managing student conduct, teacher leadership, school leadership, professional development, and instructional practices and support (2014North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey Research Brief, 2014).
Using these eight factors, the North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions survey asks 79 questions with seven falling under the construct of Time, nine under Facilities and Resources, eight under Community Support and Involvement, seven under Managing Student Conduct, seven under Teacher Leadership, 11 under School Leadership, 13 under Professional Development, and 17 under Instructional Practices and Support (2014North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey Research Brief, 2014). The survey uses a four-part Likert scale that ranges from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree,” with an option for “don’t know” for each question (2014
North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey Research Brief, 2014).
Some questions are not noted in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey Research Brief but are in the survey as a whole; these deal with teacher
leadership and are not be included for this study. The scales for these additional questions begin with no role at all and extend up to a large role (“North Carolina
Teaching Working Conditions Survey”, 2016). This research does not use questions that document the amount of time and have scale ranges from none to more than 10 hours due to the difference in the scale as well (“North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions Survey”, 2016). Similarly, I did not use questions under the factor of professional development that ask teachers which type of professional development they need and the amount of professional development they have had due to the difference in scale (“North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions Survey”, 2016). Several questions in the Overall category were not used for the same reasons (“North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions Survey”, 2016). Finally, questions under the category of New Teacher Support were not be used because these questions were asked only to teachers new to the profession (“North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions Survey”, 2016).
At the time of writing this dissertation, the 2016 research brief had not been released, so I used the 2014 research brief. For the 2014 year, 105,136 educators in North Carolina completed the survey (2014North Carolina Teacher Working
Conditions Survey Research Brief, 2014). Of those survey participants, 89% were
teachers, 7% were other licensed educators, and 4% were administrators (2014North
Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey Research Brief, 2014). Confirmatory
factor analysis was used on this data set and confirmed that the eight factors listed above were consistent with the initial theoretical framework (2014North Carolina
Teacher Working Conditions Survey Research Brief, 2014). The overall reliability of
the North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions Survey indicates that it can be generalized, so that if it is used in similar populations, similar results will be produced
of these eight factors occurred between teacher leadership and school leadership (2014
North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey Research Brief, 2014). The
development of teacher leaders by school leaders is a critical component of theories concerning distributed leadership.
Table 3.1. Questions identified in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey that correlate with distribute leadership.
Categories Questions
Empowerment Q6.1 b. Teachers are trusted to make sound professional decisions about instruction.
Q6.1 c. Teachers are relied upon to make decisions about educational issues.
Q6.1 d. Teachers are encouraged to participate in school leadership roles. Q6.5 Teachers have an appropriate level of influence on decision making in this school.
Developing leadership Q6.1 a. Teachers are recognized as educational experts.
Q6.1 b. Teachers are trusted to make sound professional decisions about instruction.
Q6.1 d. Teachers are encouraged to participate in school leadership roles.
Q6.1 g. Teachers are effective leaders in this school.
Q7.1 a. Please rate how strongly you agree or disagree with statements about leadership in your school
that there is an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect in this school. Q7.3 e. The school leadership makes a sustained effort to address teacher concerns about teacher leadership.
Shared decisions Q6.1e. The faculty has an effective process for making group decisions to solve problems.
Q6.1g. Teachers are effective leaders in this school.
Collective engagement Q2.1 b. Teachers have time available to collaborate with colleagues. Q6.1 d. Teachers are encouraged to participate in school leadership roles. Q6.1 e. The faculty has an effective process for making group decisions to solve problems.
Q6.1 g. Teachers are effective leaders in this school.
Q6.5 Teachers have an appropriate level of influence on decision making in this school.
Q7.1 i. The school improvement team provides effective leadership at this school.
Note. Categories were used from “Pursuing the elusive construct of distributed leadership: Is the search over?” by S. Hairon and J Goh, 2015, Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 43 (5), p 693-718. Questions were all identified from the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey given in 2016.
To identify questions in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions survey aligned with distributed leadership, I referenced a survey created by Hairon & Goh (2015) that was given to administrators and lead teachers and focused on distributed leadership. This survey identified four underlying factors of distributed leadership: bounded empowerment, developing leadership, shared decisions and collective
engagement (Hairon &Goh, 2015). Using this previous distributed leadership survey, I identified questions from the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey that fell under these four categories. Table 3.1 documents the questions I identified in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey that were most likely to indicate distributive leadership. This table also shows which specific component of distributed leadership each question mostly likely aligns with. Several of these questions could potentially be an indicator for multiple categories of distributed leadership. Table 3.2 identifies these questions and the multiple categories from Hairon & Goh’s (2015) work that these questions fall under.
Table 3.2. Questions identified in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey that fall under multiple factors.
Questions Multiple Categories
Q6.1 b. Teachers are trusted to make sound Empowerment, Developing Leadership professional decisions about instruction.
Q6.1 d. Teachers are encouraged to participate in Empowerment, Developing Leadership school leadership roles.
Q6.5 Teachers have an appropriate level of Empowerment, Collective Engagement influence on decision making in this school.
Q6.1 g. Teachers are effective leaders in this school. Developing Leadership, Shared Decisions, Collective Engagement
Q6.1e. The faculty has an effective process for making Shared Decisions, Collective Engagement Note. Categories were used from “Pursuing the elusive construct of distributed leadership: Is the search
given in 2016.
Finally, I used data from non-charter public schools only and omitted responses from charter schools, because the focus of this work was to examine and measure the perception of distributed leadership in a school as the school interacts with a district as a whole.
Along with collecting the percent of staff that agree or strongly agree with questions in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey for each non- charter public school in the state that participated in the survey, I collected the teacher turnover rate for each school as well. Because other school characteristics may impact teacher turnover, it was important that I considered information concerning the district in which each school resides, the percent of economically disadvantaged students (EDS), the school level (elementary, middle or high), the school growth score, and the school achievement score, all of which were available through the North Carolina Department of Instruction website. Specific percentages were not available for EDS data collected. Instead 5% point ranges were available for each school (School A between 40% and 45%). For school level, I identified schools that serviced students that fell within the range of pre-Kindergarten to 5th grade as elementary. For middle school I identified schools that offered any range between 6th and 8th grades, and for high school I noted schools that served students between 9th and 12th grade. Schools that taught students in grade levels that went across these grade spans or were early colleges were identified as other. I coded elementary as 1, middle school as 2, high school as 3 and other as 4. Achievement scores were a measure of how students on average performed on end-of- grade and end-of-course tests for a specific school for the 2016 school year
(Performance and Growth of North Carolina Public Schools Executive Summary, 2018). Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS) growth scores were a measure of the average student growth at a school for end-of-grade and end-of-course assessments (Performance and Growth of North Carolina Public Schools Executive Summary, 2018).
Methods
Once data was gathered from the North Carolina Teaching Working Conditions Survey, I created a measure by averaging the percent of staff in each school that agreed or strongly agreed for all identified questions from the literature review identified in Table 3.1. This measure was labeled Distributed Leadership 1 (DL1).
For the next distributed leadership measure, I used confirmatory factor analysis to confirm that the specific questions identified as indicators for the latent factor of distributed leadership were indicators of the underlying factor when used with a larger population and one that includes all teachers and administrators, not just
administrators and teacher leaders. To do this, I created a model using all the questions identified as indicators to the latent factor of distributed leadership. I then used
maximum likelihood estimate and identified the unique variance, the factor loadings for each indicator, and the factor variance for the latent factor of distributed leadership using the Stata software package (Brown, 2014).
Equation 3.1
𝐹"# = Ι𝑛 𝑆 − Ι𝑛 Σ + 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑒 𝑆 Σ12 − 𝑝
In this equation FML is the maximum likelihood that minimizes the difference between
I then assessed the model’s goodness of fit by using the Stata software to calculate several goodness of fit indices. To measure absolute fit, I used the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR). To measure the parsimony correction, I used root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) (Brown, 2014). I used the comparative fit index (CFI) and the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI) to measure a comparative fit (Brown, 2014). Overall, strict hard and fast cutoffs are not recommended when looking at each of these measures (Brown, 2014). Guidelines, however, are available and the following were used for this study. For SRMR values, a goodness of fit is determined if the value is close to or below .08 (Brown, 2014). Concerning RMSEA, values close to .06 or below constitute goodness of fit, with .05 being a good model fit, .06-.09 being adequate model fits, and models with .1 or higher being rejected (Brown, 2014). For the CFI and TLI, measures of .95 or higher indicate good model fit, .90 to .95 indicate an acceptable model fit, and below .90 are rejected (Brown, 2014). Based on this analysis, I determined if there was a good fit between the survey data and underlying research concerning distributed leadership. If there was not a good fit, questions needed to be removed until the goodness of fit indices met the criteria listed above.
After these questions were identified and the goodness of fit of the model was verified, I used the results of these questions to create a second measure of distributed leadership, which I labeled Distributed Leadership 2 (DL2). To do this, I averaged the percent of staff who agreed or strongly agreed at each school for each question in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey that hold together using
CFA for Chapel Hill – Carrboro City Schools
Prior to completing the factor analysis with the larger data set, I used a smaller data set, specifically the results of the Teaching Working Conditions Survey, which was given to all schools in the Chapel Hill - Carrboro City School System in 2016.
Table 3.3. Confirmatory Factor Analysis of indicators of the underlying factor of Distributed Leadership in the North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey for 2016 in Chapel Hill – Carrboro City Schools
Questions Coef. Std. Err. Error Variance z score
Q6.1b 1.00 (constrained) .0011
Q6.1c .941 .064 .001 14.75
Q6.1d .206 .062 .002 3.30
Q6.1g .529 .108 .0058 4.92
Q7.1a 1.11 .123 .0065 9.04
Note. Stata was used to conduct this Confirmatory Factor Analysis
I used maximum likelihood to estimate the model with this smaller data set. For each